Will Smith hunts robots in Asimov adaptation

After spending several movies hunting renegade aliens, Will Smith is ready for a change. Now, he’ll hunt renegade robots in ”I, Robot,” based on the pioneering android stories written by Isaac Asimov in the 1940s. According to Variety, he’ll shoot the film for Twentieth Century Fox in April, with Alex Proyas (”Dark City”) directing.

Asimov’s ”I, Robot” short story collection, which inpired much of the android-themed sci-fi that followed, imagined a world where robots live among humans and are forbidden to harm their flesh-and-blood masters. In the movie, Smith will play a droid-phobic detective investigating a murder who suspects that a robot committed the crime, believing that the ‘bots have found a way to evade the laws of robotics. ”The big idea here is that if the robots have found a way to violate the laws, there is nothing to stop them from taking over, because the human race is so dependent on robots and automation,” Fox president Hutch Parker tells Variety. Judging by some of the perfunctory movies that have come out this year, including Smith’s ”Men in Black II,” the robots may have already taken over Hollywood.